Google's Data-Trove Dance

Internal Debates Arise Over Using Collected Information and Protecting Privacy

In 2011, Google Inc. Chief Executive and co-founder Larry Page asked executives to develop a new, simplified privacy tool that would act as a kind of sliding scale, allowing users to designate whether they wanted minimal, medium or maximum collection of information about them in all of Google's services, and how much the information would be shielded from being viewed by other users.

After much wrangling and many attempts to build the "slider" tool, whose three main settings were nicknamed "kitten,"...